The Tipping Point of Sentience

When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic--"High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L"--a HOLMES FOUR. He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one percent of time and Luna Authority never believed in idle hands. They kept hooking hardware into him--decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neur...

 Student Loans will Exceed $1 Trillion

Two things, however, are clear. The size of student debt is vast (see chart), and lots of borrowers are struggling. More than 10m students took out loans for the latest academic year, according to a report issued on October 26th by the College Board, a consortium of academic institutions. Almost a third of students graduating from college, and 69% of the ones dropping out, hold debt tied to their education. The total amount of debt is staggering. The New York Federal Reserve Bank puts it at ...

 Knowledge of Nature is Like an Account at the Bank

Knowledge of Nature is an account at bank, where each dividend is added to the principal and the interest is ever compounded; and hence it is that human progress, founded on natural knowledge, advances with ever increasing speed.

 It's Raining DNA Outside

It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air. ... [spreading] DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. … It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer...

 The Difficult Choice of Being the First Heart Donor

For a dying man it is not a difficult decision [to agree to become the world's first heart transplant] ... because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you would not accept such odds if there were no lion.

 Money is Fiction

Ira Glass: For money, afterall, long ago, we used to use gold, and if you wanted to buy something, you had to carry around these heavy, shiny pieces of metal. Then we decided, no, let's just leave the gold in a bank. Instead of the gold, we're going to carry around these pieces of paper, and the paper on them says, "Yes, there's gold. You can take this paper money to a bank, you can swap it for gold." Maybe you've seen old dollars that say on them "Promise to pay the bearer so many dollars in...